{"id":81760,"date":"2018-09-28T15:14:48","date_gmt":"2018-09-28T22:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=81760"},"modified":"2018-10-24T13:48:05","modified_gmt":"2018-10-24T20:48:05","slug":"art-as-a-bridge-between-jonestown-and-modern-life","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=81760","title":{"rendered":"Art as a Bridge between Jonestown and Modern Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first heard of Jonestown and Peoples Temple when I was a kid but it wasn\u2019t until a couple of years ago that I started to get deeper into it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been fascinated by what is usually labelled as \u201cCult,\u201d basically a religious group led by a charismatic guru who is able to influence thousands of people with his ideas. Nevertheless I do believe Peoples Temple represents a very complex object of study that couldn\u2019t hardly be summarized as a mere cult built around the figure of Jim Jones.<\/p>\n

The more I studied Peoples Temple, the more I discovered several shades of the same color that slowly turned my shared general interest in the subject into a need to do something of my own, which turned out to be a still on-going mixed media artwork. Like many works of art \u2013 like many human endeavors, including Peoples Temple itself \u2013 it\u2019s difficult to write \u201cThe end\u201d on it.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know what I was expecting from the pictures. I thought perhaps something weird would came up to the surface sooner or later, but I was wrong.<\/p>\n

My first decision was an easy one: I would not consider any of the photographs of Jonestown\u2019s aftermath. What remained \u2013 at least, what I found \u2013 were smiling people, community workers, different cultures coexisting within the same community. Basic vernacular photography.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Still those pictures were not enough to understand, so I started going through the letters and tape transcriptions of the community members. During this process of analysis, I\u2019ve noticed a big discrepancy between the texts contents and the subjects of the images. Drawing from the work Mnemosyne Atlas<\/em> by Aby Warburg, I built up a panel where different kind of resources (images + texts) are juxtaposed to show two sides of the same coin at the same time. It also represents a visual example of what lies behind the curtain of the appearance showing a multifaceted reality.<\/p>\n

At the moment I\u2019m figuring out the best way to link our contemporary situation with Jonestown in order to build a strong visual work able to show how particular patterns are redundant throughout history.<\/p>\n

What happens today doesn\u2019t differ so much compared to 40 years ago. Probably there will always be a charismatic demagogue able to direct people\u2019s thoughts in a particular way, exploiting different leverages to reach a goal, even if it isn\u2019t clear to everyone who follows the leader.<\/p>\n

What keeps changing are the methodologies related to control, influence and direct people\u2019s support through targeted advertising and manipulation of social media. This is not far from what happened a few months ago with Cambridge Analytica which inappropriately collected personal user information where more than 87 million Facebook profiles were mined for data, allegedly used to direct specific political campaigns advertisements supported by the company, such as Trump\u2019s election and the Brexit vote.<\/p>\n

(Lorenzo Bacci may be reached at lorenzobacci29@gmail.com<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first heard of Jonestown and Peoples Temple when I was a kid but it wasn\u2019t until a couple of years ago that I started to get deeper into it. I\u2019ve always been fascinated by what is usually labelled as \u201cCult,\u201d basically a religious group led by a charismatic guru who is able to influence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":81154,"menu_order":33,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-81760","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81760"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83599,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81760\/revisions\/83599"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}